I kind of feel bad that the switch from "learn to code" to "why schools work" was so jarring. I definitely need to do a better job making it a bit more skim-able. But I definitely don't feel bad about advising people to start learning to code by learning HTML and CSS if their goal is to eventually learn to build web-apps.

It certainly is coding in the most literal sense of writing code to be interpreted by a computer, although it's not a programming language. You are correct about that. Nevertheless, it's a great starting place for beginners.

You definitely can get paid for building static websites. Somehow I did.